patientplatypus

I'll believe aliens exist when little green men walk up to me, shake my hand, and start discussing the engineering particulars of faster than light travel. Until then...

This makes me happy.

If you want to end homelessness in California build affordable housing everywhere and hire the homeless to be go-fors on construction projects.

There is absolutely no reason that there should be sub five story buildings in downtown San Francisco when there are people living on the street.

Imagine if people could start building these cool buildings from AI: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-31/architect... but for large scale residential housing. You could have a whole new generation of architectural firms building the future of urban living.

Oh and we just figured out how to make Roman concrete https://www.popsci.com/science/roman-concrete/.

You have no idea how exciting this is.

I registered - you can only unlock the link for "8 credits".

Yeah...anyone willing to just post a google drive link on an anonymous account or something?

This is what happens when you tie everyone's wealth into how much their house is worth.

Or you could make the government responsible for cleaning the sidewalks.

https://sfgov.org/mod/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documen... https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1663-bdc2-8fa6-27737287...

Personally I'm holding out until 2024 so the Bell Riots can give us the utopia we've all been promised.

Sigh.

I'm not too worried. You'll all be standing out in the breadline with me soon enough. Keep building robots that automate your jobs out of existence. I find it amusing.

I'm homeless and living in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

People here want you to

- Be in a gang (or a prostitute, thief, ex-con and so forth) - Be on drugs (or in rehab for drugs) - Have a mental illness (so you can go to therapy) - Be disabled - Find religion

There isn't a position for "I ran out of money and my family wouldn't support me, and at some point finding web development work became too hard as the technology became more complicated." People want you to "get better." I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't steal or assault anyone.

I just don't have any money.

But people here are morons. They need to have a reason for why someone is poor other than "I'm a person of average intelligence that doesn't know how to find a paying job in this society." I don't want to be psychoanalyzed, be put into rehab, go to church or join any number of the lonely people who have to have a support group because society is awful. I don't have problems other than being poor - if you managed to buy into the crypto ponzi scheme at the right time then no one is asking you to "find god" or "get better".

People are social animals. If you put them in a position where those are the options (jail, crime, drugs, psychoanalysis, religion, disability) they'll take the least unpalatable. There's a whole lot of people who walk around here with canes they don't need because otherwise the San Francisco General Assistance office won't spring for them to have housing. Also known as an apartment with a bed and a door that locks.

If I make more than 1500 dollars I lose my health insurance through Medi-cal.

And I'm no defender of a lot of these people. The bastards that set up tents on the sidewalk and smoke meth are just awful. But on the other hand, I have absolutely no idea how to get a job. None. I've done construction before and all I ended up with was bad memories and scarred hands. I could work "security" by putting on a t-shirt and standing outside a soup kitchen, but that's just bullshit make work the charities give out so the poor can buy shoes and feel special about themselves. Real security jobs outside of bars are a good way to get killed. And that's about it. I'm staying at a homeless shelter and have the clothes on my back so how am I supposed to get a job?

There's your why.

So let me give you a when. When, not if, your industry is automated or the code becomes too complicated for you to understand anymore you'd better have enough savings or a social network so you don't become homeless. Or you'll have to crawl into one of the buckets that allows society to make sense of you.

And today I'm sitting in the San Francisco library looking to make a contribution to a software project for free and I just don't know that I care anymore. And if you tell me it'll get better, then I have to ask if you're about to be laid off or not and what your plans are.

This isn't all that surprising. I mean, it's surprising a priori, but not post hoc when considering the social culture of the United States.

Construction is a job that you go into if you've been to prison, haven't gone to college, or are an undocumented laborer. It attracts those people who are the least skilled in the country because it's a hard job that's hard on your body, pays little, and is intellectually uninteresting (compared to most college educated middle class jobs). The people who make money in the industry have to go through onerous licensing requirements and have the skills necessary to run their own business and take on the risks of having that business fail, which most people (myself included) don't have. That's managing payroll, licensing, taxation (and avoiding taxation), sales, marketing, and all the rest of it while still being able to be a master plumber or what have you which can take 10 years or more. And even then you can be making 70+ hours a week or have to be on-call for emergencies (as a plumber), only be able to get work during certain times of the year (summer for a large amount of construction), or be away from home for long periods of time (if you have a specialized skill such as oil drilling or specialized skills in setting concrete and so forth and have to travel across the country to where the work is).

I've worked day labor in construction. After only a few months my hands are messed up to the point where some days it hurts to type after longer periods of time. Have you ever had to carry dry wall, lumber or sheet rock for 8 hours a day for minimum wage? It's boring and it hurts.

I'm currently unemployed and homeless. I'd rather be unemployed and homeless than do construction again. A year of that and my body would fall apart.

As a society we've made the industry as unattractive as possible so what do you expect?

I understand that someone has to be paid to generate AI, but one of the promises of programming of the last couple of years was that if you could afford a laptop and were smart enough you could contribute to software development by contributing to github and so forth. In practice I don't know how much of that translates into practice (see AWS/cloud/hosting and so forth), but I don't like this future where the only people who are able to program the machines are able to pay for an IDE that has a monthly or per usage cost structure.

The only people who get rich during a gold rush are the people that are selling the shovels. I think that people are tired of rewarding shovel sellers.

Can someone with some industry experience comment on how RISC-V will change the geopolitical dynamics? From what I understand it's a standardized instruction set (coming out of UCS Berkeley) that would provide a standard design for chips. From what I've read it doesn't sound like the architecture would be able to be able to be used on M1 and M2 chip design, but it does mean that fabrication of chips would be open sourced so long as it conforms to the standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/tech-war-china-bets-on-...

To me this sounds like the US is adopting a bet on entrenched monopolies in Intel and TSMC while China is making a bid for open source architectures (I wouldn't say that there are "good guys" and "bad guys" here, only that in the Machiavellian sense the US has first mover advantage in chips and is engaged in import restrictions and RISC-V is a new standard).

I worry that this could have implications for Taiwan if they lose the geopolitical advantage of having a monopoly on chip production. I'm also concerned that the US administration could be placing big bets for the economy on shoring up tech firms that may become outdated when the chip making market becomes competitive again internationally.

Thoughts?

This game looks super exciting! Unfortunately, I have a mac :<.

So, I install sbcl, installed quicklisp and then used quicklisp to install your game after cloning and cc'ing into your directory. It looks like your game would work if you (or someone) looked into why your "Harmony" sound engine isn't working (line 28-29 in your package.lisp file). I attempted to load from your github/Harmony directory and this is the error -

* (ql:quickload '(harmony cl-mixed-coreaudio)) To load "harmony": Load 1 ASDF system: harmony ; Loading "harmony" ............. debugger invoked on a LOAD-FOREIGN-LIBRARY-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {7008640253}>: Unable to load any of the alternatives: ("libmixed2.dylib" "libmixed.dylib" "mac-arm64-libmixed.dylib")

I tested the other audio implementations suggested as well and they don't work either. Is there a way to play this game without sound? That might fix the problem. I don't know how much I'm willing to dig into this, because cl-mixed is it's own library and it looks like it would start to become a rabbit hole.

It looks cool though!

This has always been the part of academia I have not understood. Academics are supposed to "know" more than the public. They are paid to have some understanding of reality in a way that the lay public does not so they can have tenure - that is they can't be fired (or it is very hard) for researching controversial subjects with payoffs that are hard to define by someone not in the field.

Everyone else in academia is working towards this end result or drops out somewhere along the path and works in industry. The exception being those specialist degrees that are quasi-academic such as law and medicine, but which have more applied (and therefore measurable) results.

And yet, we don't hold these people to the standards they set for themselves as a cohort? I wouldn't expect every paper to be replicable, or every researcher to always be right. But I see things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive and wonder how many billions of dollar were put into this thing. It's essentially a state backed way of defrauding the public out of tax dollars to pay people with doctorates that made friends with other people with doctorates. What if the US spent the money that was used on the EmDrive on housing or social services for instance? Or building libraries or bridges?

All it would take would be for a few academic journals to demand that the statistical replication of papers be required, but it would mean that the editors would have to be guided by principles other than maximizing revenue.

I agree. Consider the octopus - each of it's limbs contains it's own cortex and so it has in essence 8 separable brains. Or ants and bees which contain a hive intelligence. An ant has almost no neurons, but the collective number of neurons of an ant hive approaches that of a human brain. These are only creatures that are on our earth that have radically alternative ways of experiencing intelligence. Why would we expect aliens to have an intelligence that's at all comparable to humanity when even somewhat intelligent animals on our planet don't exhibit the same characteristics?

In the future, when the machine learning algorithms begin to gain sentience, the AI generated porn of the future will be start training humans, or using HLI (Human Learning Models). Human pornography addicts will slowly have their input streams changed so that they become more and more sensitized to find computer hardware and software more and more arousing. First, it's an artifact here or there and before you know it there you are at 3 am with your pants around your ankles staring at a screen of functional software diagrams.

And people said there'd be flying cars.

I find it so weird. Aren't there any bosses that say "Yeah, fuck you we're not doing that." That's the point of a boss. If I were in charge of a bunch of programmers and a mandate came down from on high to rate programmers based on commits or keystrokes, my first response would be "Eat shit." and my second response would be "No, really, I'm not treating my people like dogs. Eat shit."

This reminds me of a story idea that I had. Thanks for that.

EDIT:

This guys is clearly a weird dude, which is both a critique and a praise. Most of what makes the world interesting and worth living in is made by people who are weird in some way.

I don't know that I agree with all of his positions - there's a large (and I mean large) compendium on what he calls spaced repetition (https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition) the main thesis of which appears to be that repetition helps learning but only if it's spaced out over time. I don't know - this is an area where I'm out of my depth, but it appears like this isn't his area of expertise (computer science and writing), and he's trying to put together a thesis by dint of just writing a lot. Which I don't know is best practice or peer reviewed - huge amounts of science articles, even peer reviewed ones, are non-reproducible, so even that is flawed. Much of his writing appears to be in this style of long, obsessively researched posts. Both good and bad - it's certainly different than the "No You!" of most social media - I'm looking at you Tik-Tok.

What I do like about the site is his use of deep linking. Personal websites where people put in the effort to make something new that's not just the same old social media paradigm are welcome additions to the internet and I think that they should be featured more on hackernews. It's too bad that this was made in Haskell. I don't know that using stacked Iframes like this would work in javascript without causing an overuse of memory. Would someone more knowledgeable about this than I chime in?

His writing credentials themselves look super impressive. Check this out:

I am a freelance American writer & researcher. (To make ends meet, I have a Patreon , benefit from Bitcoin appreciation thanks to some old coins, and live frugally.) I have worked for, published in, or consulted for: Wired (2015), MIRI / SIAI2 (2012–2013), CFAR (2012), GiveWell (2017), the FBI (2016), Cool Tools (2013), Quantimodo (2013), New World Encyclopedia (2006), Bitcoin Weekly (2011), Mobify (2013–2014), Bellroy (2013–2014), Dominic Frisby (2014), and private clients (2009-); everything on Gwern.net should be considered my own viewpoint or writing unless otherwise specified by a representative or publication. I am currently not accepting new commissions.

In sum, the guy looks weird, but definitely worth reading if only you take what he's saying with a grain of salt.

Yeah - if I were to read a technical analysis of a new idea I'd like it to be not an advertisement from the people building said product. This is just an ad.

What's the current state of research on true volumetric displays? That's what I'm excited for, although that takes less AI and more hardware, so quite a bit more difficult.

This isn't on my github - this doesn't sound real unless their beta testing on some accounts and not others. So it's a bad idea and they'll turn it off. Storm in a tea cup.

This is wonderful. Thanks for making it.

-- Wanted to share a memory. Growing up there was this put-put course that was called Magic Mountain that my family and I used to go to. It was sort of a big hill that they made into a mountain so that when you were walking on it you felt like you were a giant. Anyway they had this small stream that came down the side of the mountain and wound in-between all of the courses. There was this one hole where the stream intersected at the top of this really obnoxious little course with lots of switchbacks and weird angles. You were "supposed to" (quote on quote) jump the stream and continue on with the hole, but if you managed to knock your ball into the stream there was a ball catch at the bottom that would push the ball back onto the course near the hole so it didn't get washed out to the bottom of the entire mountain. It was possible to make a hole in one if you knocked the ball into the stream - the little river would carry the ball down to the bottom and then gently push it into the hole. Your game reminded me of that memory. Thanks.

This doesn't make sense. If the cost of gasoline rises then they should be raising wages. The labor market is tight right now, I don't understand.

I have this idea that I'm probably too stupid to implement. It's a what-if scenario so just follow along for the moment.

What if someone made an image board style web page, similar to 4chan, with a space for people to upload pictures and comments as well as a blog section. Just a polished javascript application that would be fully open source.

Let's say 1000 people downloaded this application and made their own image boards. You could pull the image data from each of the 1000 chan boards and take the top 100 posts from each category and create a master list, without comments, that would act as a sort of newspaper. The ads from the newspaper would go to fund the continual development and maintenance of the system as a whole including the chan board itself.

I like this idea because it would mean that since the *chan board would be open source and written in javascript + some backend language (python?) each of the boards itself would have a javascript template, a backend with SQL for the boards and comments, and an API hook to the master server. Only the API endpoints to the master server (phoenix?) would be non-negotiable and it would allow the community to customize the open source webpage.

There would be no "building-blocks" that are so high level as to be non-functional.

The open source web page itself could be used in standalone mode without the API hooks to the server (but not have added benefits that the server could give such as dashboard analytics, the chance to have posts be on the main newspaper, and maybe some AI image classification, a chat hook that connected the chan boards through socketing?).

The newspaper would be a real source of truth because there would be no incentive to game the system - no master website to knock over or gain the top comment off of. The individual websites and the SQL data would all be owned by individual devs running their own environments. The application itself would be continuously improved by a community of people who cared about open source software and not by an algorithmically driven corporation.

Like I say I'm probably too dumb to build this, but I'm working on a small website and maybe I can turn it into that. Or maybe someone else will start building this and I can help. But I think that this is important given where the news and social media is these days so it would be exciting if this were made.

The keynote is impressive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39ubNuxnrK8).

They can make an AI factory that will fit many times the current internet throughput in a small room.

I'm super excited about what kinds of applications this could mean.

I disagree. Schools were founded on the principle that the best and brightest minds will teach the new generation (this goes all the way back to Athens). If you separate the researchers into a "research university" and the other students into "trade schools" eventually you'll just make the class divide all that much worse because the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedagogy than the subject, or who themselves are not as qualified.

If you were a student (or the parent of a student) looking to advance in your field, and you had the choice, would you choose Harvard or say a local community college trade school? It's easy to make massive sweeping sociological choices for the public without considering that you yourself would not make that choice. Obviously, multiply your preferences times every student in the field.

If you want to say there's a funding crisis and you want to deal with that funding crisis in some other way, then yes, I agree.

Also, I don't personally care for sports. I still think they have a place at a University, just not to the extent that they're funded. If independent undergraduate research projects were awarded (and advertised!) with the same funding as sports teams and sports teams had their funding lowered, I think that might be interesting. Incubator lab competitions in science research projects that would have the results published in journals. Start up accelerators with paid promotions etc etc.

How else to organize the budget at universities I don't know how to speculate. It means that with a finite amount of money some resource is getting cut somewhere and someone else is having an increase in endowment which gets super political. I'm also not necessarily sure that cutting liberal arts is a good idea. Many of the people I went to school with (at least one I helped pass advanced maths...) spent the majority of their time drinking and ended up working in investment banks. Forcing them to read a little poetry or sit through a lecture or two on a few sociology courses is maybe a good idea so that when they're out there ruling the (financial) universe they have a bit of awareness of the way the rest live.

My thoughts for what they're worth.

I guessss.....except if I want to make an app (and not a web page) I would probably make it in electron, because again I don't have to code everything twice. Making apps for apple watch or an iPad just doesn't appeal to me I guess - they always seemed like devices that were invented so people could spend more money on needless crap. Is a watch with a touch screen really that much more useful than a smart phone? Seems like just another way to suck people into a walled garden. Your watch sinks to your iPad, iTV, iWhatever...Yeesh, who cares?

I remember the last update (Mojave?) where the first release gave root access and allowed unlocking of the computer by default. Woops!

Yeah, no thanks. Until Apple learns to release non-buggy crap I'll wait out the horror show for at least the next 6 months. You guys have fun debugging this for me!

EDIT: Pretty funny watching all the Apple fanboys going through my account and downvoting all my posts. Oh no! My fake internet points! /s

Yeah...and SwiftUI is by default an iOS only program. Flutter you can plug any phone in that's been made in the last 5 years, type `flutter run` in the terminal, and get hot reloading.

SwiftUI is walled-garden bait. Hard pass.

EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted - (one of) Flutter's main selling point is that it's cross platform by default. SwiftUI doesn't do that and yet is marketed to be very similar in coding style to Flutter, which yeah great, but no cross platform so you still have to code everything twice, unless all your users happen to have iPhones. I mean really?

That's OK, guillotines are cheap.

Wait, really?

Can the IRS be sued for violating equal protection under the law? They have admitted that they don't have the budget to go after high net worth individuals who can pay tax attorneys to hide their income in tax loopholes, so isn't that a tacit admittance that the rich can cheat on their taxes with impunity? If that's the case then not all citizens are held equally accountable to the same laws.

That would seem to be a violation of the fourteenth amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause) The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides "nor shall any State [...] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".

Unless of course your job was automated out of existence by a robot...Seems like a bit of an oversight in your calculations hmm?